Ex-wife Takes Stand As Trial Begins In Assault-plot Case

September 26, 1985|By Mary Anderson, Staff Writer

The trial of a Connecticut man, charged with trying to hire someone to rape and mutilate his ex-wife so she would return to him because nobody else would want her, will reveal a story of obsessive love and hate, the prosecution claimed in Broward Circuit Court Wednesday.

But the defense claims that John Christian Longo, 36, is guilty only of being emotional, vulnerable and distraught after a run-in with his ex-wife and her family landed him in jail.

``The person that ought to be on trial today is not John. The person who manufactured this whole thing is Allan Braden,`` said Assistant Public Defender Gary Cowart, who characterized Braden as a jailhouse snitch seeking favorable treatment in his drug-trafficking case.

It was Braden who put Longo in contact last February with Michael Gillo, who posed as a hit man but is really an investigator with the State Attorney`s Office.

After the hit was to have been made, the allegedly intended victim, Sharon Hamilton, testified Wednesday, Gillo had told her to arrange cover stories with her family and colleagues that she was missing so that Longo would think she was dead.

``I was not supposed to answer the phone because I was supposed to be dead. I was supposed to have been raped and beaten. The incident was supposed to appear as a robbery, at which point I would have been beaten and blinded and raped,`` she said Gillo told her, based on his conversations with Longo.

Among the most damaging evidence against Longo are tapes of his conversations with Gillo, which prosecutor Robert Blackmore began to play for the jury Wednesday.